NAA announces 2006 Edgie Award winners

The Newspaper Association of America has announced the winners in this year’s Digital Edge (aka Edgie) Awards, for newspaper-affiliated websites. (Full disclosure, I was on the jury for the Best Overall site awards.)

The Washington Post won the honor for best overall site in the top circulation category. (Slots in the Edgies are based on newspaper print circulation totals.) Winners in other circulation categories included The Spokesman-Review (Wash.), The Modesto (Calif.) Bee and Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World.

The cartoon protests: Smart mobs at work?

Are the protests over Danish editorial cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad the latest graphic example of smart mobs? One report suggests that is the case, citing Syrian protestors.

“‘The sheikhs told us to send five text messages to every true Muslim we knew urging them to participate,’ said a student from the Abu Nour Islamic Institute in Damascus.”

Interesting. (And thanks to Jon Garfunkel for the link.) The BBC also provides welcome perspective on the controversy.

Blogs beating NY Times in online bet

Jason Kottke does the math a year early to see who’s winning the long bet between Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times over which will be more popular online in 2007: The NYTimes.com or blogs?

The actual bet is: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.”

According to Kottke’s analysis, which tracked eight top-story search terms for 2005, blogs appeared higher in Google than the NYTimes.com for six of the eight terms. But when expanded to all citizen’s media versus affiliated media, the results flipped. News sites of offline media organizations appeared higher in the search results six of the eight times.

For more detail, see kottke.org